Great Britain during and after the Napoleonic wars (56476)

Introduction

The
period from 1799 to 1815 is often referred to
as the“Napoleonic
Wars”.
These
years and the two following decades became one of the most difficult
episodes of the British history. That was the time when Great Britain
had to fight a lot, and had to recover from fighting. The purpose of
this survey is to give a brief description of British domestic and
foreign policy, economic and social situation throughout the
mentioned period and to provide essential information about the role
that Great Britain played during so-called “Napoleonic Wars”.

1. Great Britain during the “Napoleonic Wars”

In
the 1790's, the wars of the French Revolution merged into the
Napoleonic Wars, as Napoleon Bonaparte took over the French
revolutionary gov­ernment. Great Britain, as the most of the
European nations, was engaged into the set of conflicts. At first the
war did not go well for Britain. The First Coalition with Prussia,
Austria, and Rus­sia against the French col­lapsed in 1796,
and in 1797 Britain was beset by naval defeat and by naval muti­ny.
The Battle of the Nile in 1798, however, was one of the hours of the
British Navy brightest glory.

Napoleon
Bonaparte was climbing to power in France, by direct­ing her
successful arms against the world. He had beat­en Germany and
conquered Italy; he had threatened England, and his dream was of the
conquest of the East. Like another Alexander, he hoped to subdue
Asia, and overthrow the hated British power by depriving it of India.
Hitherto, his dreams had become earnest by the force of his
marvellous genius, and by the ar­dour which he breathed into the
whole French nation. And when he set sail from Toulon, with 40,000
tried and victorious soldiers and a magnificent fleet, all were
filled with vague expectations of almost fabulous glo­ry. He
swept away the Knights of St. John from their rock of Malta, and
sailed for Alexandria in Egypt, in the end of June, 1798.

His
intentions had not become known, and the English Mediterranean fleet
was watching the course of this great armament. Sir Horatio Nelson
was in pur­suit, with the English vessels, and wrote to the First
Lord of the Admiralty: "Be they bound to the Antipo­des,
your lordship may rely that I will not lose a mo­ment in bringing
them to action".

Nelson
had, however, not ships enough to be de­tached to reconnoitre,
and he actually overpassed the French, whom he guessed to be on the
way to Egypt. He arrived at the port of Alexandria on the 28th of
June, and saw its blue waters and flat coast lying still in their
sunny torpor, as if no enemy were on the seas. He went back to
Syracuse, but could learn no more there. He obtained provisions with
some difficulty, and then, in great anxiety, sailed for Greece, where
at last, on the 28th of July, he learnt that the French fleet had
been seen from Candia, steering to the south-east, about four weeks
since. In fact, it had actually passed by him in a thick haze, which
concealed each feet from the other, and had arrived at Alexandria on
the 1st of July three days after he had left it. Every sail was set
for the south, and at four o'clock in the afternoon of the 1st of
August a very different sight was seen in Aboukir Bay, so solitary a
month ago. It was crowded with shipping. Great castle-like men-of-war
rose with all their proud calm dignity out of the water, their dark
portholes opening in the white bands on their sides, and the
tricoloured flag floating as their ensign. There were thirteen ships
of the line and one, tower­ing high above the rest, with her
three decks, was L'Orient, of
120 guns. The British had only fourteen little ships, not one
carrying more than 74 guns, and one only 50.

Why
Napoleon had kept the fleet there was never known. In his usual way
of disavowing whatever turned out ill, he laid the blame upon his
naval officers. But, though dead men could not tell tales, his papers
made it plain that the ships had remained in the obedience to
commands, though they had not been able to enter the harbour of
Alexandria. Large rewards had been offered to any pilot who would
take them in, but none could be found who would venture to steer into
that port a vessel drawing more than twenty feet of water. They had,
therefore, remained at anchor outside, in Aboukir Bay, drawn up in a
curve along the deepest of the water, with no room to pass them at
either end, so that the commanders reported that they could bid
defiance to a force more than double their number. The French
believed that Nelson had not ventured to attack them when they had
passed by one another a month before, and when the English fleet was
sig­nalled, they still supposed that it was too late in the day
for an attack to be made.

Nelson
had, however, no sooner learnt that the French were in sight than he
signalled from his ship, the Vanguard, that
prepa­rations for battle should be made, and in the meantime
summoned up his captains to receive his orders during a hurried meal.
He ex­plained that, where there was room for a large French ship
to swing, there was room for a small English one to anchor, and,
therefore, he designed to bring his ships up to the outer part of the
French line, and station them close below their adver­saries.

In
the fleet went, through the fierce storm of shot and shell from a
French battery in an island in ad­vance. Nelson's own ship, the
Vanguard, was
the first to anchor within half-pistolshot of a French ship, the
Spartiate. The
Vanguard had
six colours flying, in case any should be shot away; and such was the
fire that was directed on her, that in a few minutes every man at the
six guns in her forepart was killed or wounded, and this happened
three times. Nelson himself received a wound in the head, which was
thought at first to be mortal, but which proved but slight. He would
not allow the surgeon to leave the sailors to attend to him till it
came to his turn.

Meantime
his ships were doing their work glori­ously. The Bellerophon was,
indeed, overpowered by L'Orient, 200
of her crew killed, and all her masts and cables shot away, so that
she drifted away as night came on. But the Swiftsure came
up in her place, and the Alexander and
Leander both
poured in their shot. The French admiral received three wounds, but
would not quit his post, and at length a fourth shot almost cut him
in two. He desired not to be carried below, but that he might die on
deck.

About
nine o'clock the ship took fire, and blazed up with fearful
brightness, lighting up the whole bay, and showing five French ships
with their colours hauled down, the other's still fighting on. Nelson
himself rose and came on deck when this fearful glow came shin­ing
from sea and sky into his cabin. He gave orders that the English
boats should immediately be put off for L'Orient, to
save as many lives as possible.

Then
a thundering explosion shook down to the very hold every ship in the
harbour, and burning frag­ments of L'Orient came
falling far and wide, splashing heavily into the water, in the dead,
awful stillness that followed the fearful sound. English boats were
plying busily about, picking up those who had leapt over­board in
time. Some were dragged in through the lower portholes of the English
ships, and about seventy were saved altoghether. By sunrise the
victory was complete. Nay, as Nel­son said, "It was not a
victory, but a conquest". Only four French ships escaped, and
Napoleon and his army were cut off from home. The destruction of
Napoleon's fleet left his troops in a position from which no
victo­ries were likely to extricate them.

With
Napoleon out of the way William Pitt was able to form the Second
Coalition with Russia and Austria. The Russian army drove the French
out of North Italy, and the king of Naples effected a
counter­revolution in the South with the support of Horatio
Nelson's fleet. In the autumn of 1798 Napoleon left his army and
returned to Paris. He overthrew the Direc­tory and established
himself as First Consul. The war with revolutionary France entered
its second phase. At first the French armies were welcomed as
libera­tors by both the middle and lower classes of the
coun­tries they occupied. Presently the people of the con­quered
countries found that their interests were always subordinated to
those of France. The price of "libera­tion" was heavy
taxes and the conscription of their sons to fill the gaps in the
ranks of the French army. War was necessary for the continued
internal stability of Napoleonic France, yet war could be carried on
only by the progressive exploitation of the "liberated"
ter­ritories. The result was that the very classes which had
welcomed the French were gradually alienated. The French occupation
created a burgeous national­ism that turned against its creators.

Napoleon
had many years of victory before him in 1799. A short and brilliant
campaign reconquered Ita­ly, and the Second Coalition collapsed
in the last days of 1800. In the years that followed, with Britain
alone left in the war and no important land operations, Napoleon
created the Code Napoleon and an efficient civil service. In 1802
Britain had to make peace with Napo­leon at Amiens, The Treaty of
Amiens was a mere truce. It left France in control of Holland and all
the western bank of the Rhine. War broke out again the following
year.

When
the war was resumed, Napoleon had Spain and Holland as his allies,
and was making plans to invade Britain if the French and Spanish
fleets could be concentrated to cover the crossing. These plans never
came true, as both fleets were destroyed in the glori­ous battle
of Trafalgar.

The
naval battle of Trafalgar, one of the most cel­ebrated naval
engagements in European history, was fought on October 21, 1805, by a
British fleet and a combined French and Spanish fleet. The battle
took place off Cape Trafalgar on the southern coast of Spain, where a
British fleet of 27 ships under the command of Admiral Nelson had to
fight against a slightly larger combined enemy fleet commanded by a
French admiral.

The
French admiral had the intention to slip out of Cadiz, which was
under British blockade, to land troops in southern Italy, where the
French were fight­ing. The fleet, however, was intercepted by
Nelson on October 21.

The
French and Spanish ships formed their ships into a single battle
line, south to north. Nelson, howev­er, surprised them by
ordering his ships into two groups, each of which assaulted and cut
through the French fleet at right angles, demolishing the battle
line. This created confusion, giving the British fleet an advan­tage.
The battle began shortly before noon and ended late in the afternoon.
Some 20 French and Spanish ships had been destroyed or captured,
while not a sin­gle British vessel was lost. The British suffered
about 1500 casualties, among them Admiral Nelson, who was mortally
wounded. The British naval victory under Horatio Nelson saved Britain
from invasion. The great naval battle of 1805 is recorded in the name
of Trafal­gar Square in London. The square is dominated by the
145-ft. fluted granite column supporting a large statue of Nelson,
with four lions at the base and four bronze reliefs cast from
captured French cannon and illus­trating the battles where they
were taken.

The
year 1805 witnessed the creation of the Third Coalition with Russia
and Austria, which also collapsed in 1807. Napoleon then ruled a vast
empire which in­cluded Northern Italy, the East coast of the
Adriatic, all the territory west of the Rhine with Holland and a
large area of North Germany from Cologne to Lubeck. Spain, Naples,
Poland and all Central and Southern Germany formed his vassal states.

It
was upon Russia and Spain that Napoleon was finally broken. Neither
of these counties had a strong middle class that made the victory of
the French eas­ier in other European countries. For a time
Napoleon and Alexander I combined to dominate Europe. There were
plans to marry a Russian Grand-Princess to the French emperor to
strengthen the political union, but Napoleon was not prepared to
treat the Tzar of Russia as an equal and Alexander refused to be
subordinate.

Failing
all else Napoleon tried to strike at Britain by imposing a European
ban on the British manufac­tured goods. Britain replied with a
blockade. Both the ban and the blockade were not completely
effective. But these caused a strain that broke the alliance be­tween
France and Russia and the other North Europe­an countries.

Important
events took place in Portugal and Spain. Portugal had been for a
century dominated by the British government, and that was the reason
of the country's refusal to recognize Napoleon's "Continental
System". A French army was sent there to prevent trade between
Portugal and Britain. At the same time, Napoleon made an attempt to
change his indirect con­trol over Spain for a direct rule by
making his brother Joseph the Spanish king. This provoked an
instanta­neous and universal revolt. The Spainsh led an active
guerrilla war against the French, and Napoleon was forced to
concentrate larg­er and larger forces in Spain.

In
1808 Arthur Wellesley, later Duke of Welling­ton, was sent with a
small army to defend Portugal and assist the Spanish insur­rection.
The French had about 300,000 men in the Peninsula but were seldom
able to concentrate morethan about one-fifth against Wellington, the
rest being engaged in small operations all over the country. Ev­ery
attempt at a concentration left large areas open to the guerrillas,
so that the regular and irregular wars set up an interaction before
which the French were helpless. In 1811, when Napoleon had to draw
away part of his forces for his Russian campaign, Wellington was able
to take the offensive and step by step the French were driven out of
the Peninsula.

An
army of nearly half a million — Poles, Ger­mans and
Italians as well as Frenchmen — was massed by Napoleon in 1811
to invade Russia. The march of the Grand Army to Moscow in 1812 and
its disastrous retreat set Europe once more ablaze.

Germany
rose against the defeated emperor and at last the French found
themselves opposed to na­tions in arms. Although the French
emperor quickly collected a new army that was almost as large as the
one he had lost in Russia, Napoleon was decisively beaten at Leipzig
in October 1813.

In
spite of this he rejected an offer of peace which would have given
him the Rhine as a frontier and in April 1814 the allies entered
Paris. The Bourbons were restored, and Napoleon was banished to the
Island of Elba.

Britain,
Austria, Prussia and Russia then sent their representatives to the
Congress of Vienna to discuss the important problems of European
policy. The work of the Congress was interrupted in 1815 by Napoleon,
who had escaped from the exile and, having returned to France,
launched the Hundred Days' Campaign which ended with his defeat at
Waterloo.

The
main features of the settlement arrived at by the Congress of Vienna
were the restoration of despo­tism and the triumph of what was
called "the princi­ple of legitimacy". Revolution was
considered to be as much the enemy as France, and the victory of
reaction was sealed by the Holy Alliance in which Austria, Russia and
Prussia agreed to give each other mutual support against the horrors
of revolutionary uprisings. The Holy Alliance was used to justify
international action against risings in Italy, Germany and elsewhere.
Yet neither Prussia nor Russia could restore Europe to its previous
state, and the Holy Alliance did not survive the up­heavals of
1830.

In
France the restoration of the Bourbons did not mean the restoration
of aristocratic privilege in the vil­lages or the suppression of
the Code Napoleon. In Germa­ny, though Prussia extended her power
over the Rhine-land, many of the social changes resulting from the
French occupation went undisturbed. Small German states were drawn
together into the German Confed­eration in which Austria and
Prussia both participated and which inevitably became the theatre of
a battle between them for the hegemony of Central Europe.

The
victory over Napoleon laid the foundations for a great extension of
the British Empire. Britain got a number of strategic key points:
Malta, Mauritius, Ceylon, Heligoland and the Cape, then inhabited
only by a few Dutch farmers and valued only as a stopping place on
the way to India. Yet the first result of the peace was a severe
political and economic crisis.

2. Great Britain after Waterloo

In
Britain, the general rejoicings that followed the victory over
Napoleon were not well founded. The British had assumed that the
ending of war would open a vast market for their goods and had piled
up stocks accordingly. Instead, there was an immediate fall in the
demand for them. Eu­rope was still too disturbed and too poor to
take any great quantity of British manufactured goods.

One
important market had been actually opened by the war, which had cut
Spain off from South America and left its colonies virtually
in­dependent. This, however, had only led to crazy specu­lation
and the flooding of the market with all kinds of goods for many of
which no possible demand existed. There was also possibility to trade
in the West Indies as well as in the Far East, but these markets
could absorb only a limited quantity of the British goods.

As
a result of it in 1815 exports and imports fell. There was a heavy
slump in wholesale prices. Thus, iron fell from £20 to £8
a ton. Most of the blast-furnaces went out of production and
thousands of workers lost their work.

The
crisis was also intensified by other causes. Three hundred thousand
demobilized soldiers and sail­ors were forced to compete in an
already overstocked labour market. Wages fell considerably, while
prices were kept artificially high by the policy of inflation which
Pitt had begun in 1797 when he allowed the Bank of England to issue
paper money without a proper gold backing. Taxation was kept at a
high level by the huge Debt charges, amounting in 1820 to £30,000,000
out of a total revenue of £53,000,000. The reckless bor­rowing
by means of which the war had been financed left a heavy burden upon
several generations of the British. Inflation and high taxes
prevented the rapid recovery of industry.

This
post-war crisis was marked by a sudden out­burst of class
conflict. A series of disturbances began with the introduction of the
Corn Bill in 1815 and went on until the close of the year 1816. In
London riots ensued and were continued for several days, while the
Bill was discussed in Parliament. At Bridport there were riots on
account of the high price of bread. At Bideford there were similar
disturbances to prevent the export of grain. At Bury St. Edmunds and
any other towns the unemployed made attempts to de­stroy
machinery. They regarded machinery as enemy that deprived them of
their work. Machine wrecking was inspired by the ideas of a certain
Ludd, and peo­ple who joined it were called the Luddites.

The
Luddite riots centred in the Nottingham ho­siery area, where the
introduction of new production methods into a semi-domestic industry
had cut prices to a point at which the hand stocking knitters found
it almost impossible to make a living. Machine wrecking took place
also in many other towns. Every method of repression, including
military violence, was used by the government to suppress the Luddite
riots.

In
1819 huge meetings were held all over the North and Midlands,
demanding Parliamentary Reform and the repeal of the Corn Laws. One
such meeting was held at St. Peter's Fields, Manchester, on August
16th, when 80,000 people assembled to hear a well-known radical
speaker Hunt. When Hunt began to speak he was arrested and the
yeomanry suddenly charged into the crowd, hacking blindly with their
sabres in all di­rections.

In
a few minutes eleven people were killed and about 400, including over
100 women, were wounded. The brutality of this attack on a peaceful
crowd, and the callousness with which it was defended by the
government, made the necessity for Reform clearer than ever to the
industrial workers, and at the same time convinced many of the middle
class that Reform was the only alternative to a policy of repression
that would lead unevitably to civil war. From this time Parliamentary
Reform began to be "respectable" and to appear prominently
on the programme of the Whigs. But the immediate result of the
"Peterloo Massacre" was a tightening of the repression.
Hunt and other radicals were arrested and imprisoned. Some of them
were forced to seek a temporary refuge in America.

In
November 1819, the "Six Acts" were passed by Parliament.
These Acts made organized legal agitation for Reform more difficult.
They gave the local author­ities powers to prevent meetings of
more than fifty persons and to search private houses where they
sus­pected arms were hidden. They forbade any kind of processions
with bands or banners. They made pub­lishers of "blasphemous
and seditious libels" liable to imprisonment or transportation
and placed a tax on all newspapers and pamphlets. The object of this
was to make radical papers too dear for most part of the popu­lation.

The
"Six Acts" of 1819 were followed by a tempo­rary
diminution of Radical agitation. For this they were perhaps less
responsible than the revival of industry that began in 1820 and
continued up to the boom year of 1826. Such a revival was inevitable
once the effects of the war had passed, because British industry
really had a world monopoly at this time. Manufacturers liked to talk
about foreign competition but actually no other country had any
considerable large-scale industry or any surplus of manufactured
goods for export. France and the United States were just beginning to
develop a cotton textile industry, but even by 1833 their com­bined
output was only two-thirds of that of Britain. In mining and the iron
and steel industries British su­premacy was equally marked.

Exports
increased from £48,000,000 in 1820 to £56,000,000 in 1825
and imports from £32,000,000 to £44,000,000. But this was
only one side of the expan­sion. The same period was marked by
the steady de­cline of the British small-scale and domestic
industry before the competition of the factories. The decline of
domestic industries was uneven, taking place in the cotton before the
linen and woolen industries, in spin­ning before weaving and in
East Anglia and the West Country before the North and Midlands. It
was not completed before the 1840's, and was the cause of the most
widespread and prolonged suffering. But it di­vided the working
classes into sections with different interests and wrongs, and forced
those who were the worst sufferers into futile and objectively
reactionary forms of protest.

3. The Reform Bill

By
1830 Britain had been struck by a severe eco­nomic crisis.
Factories were closing down, unemploy­ment increased rapidly, and
the wages of workers fell. The revolution which took place in Paris
in July and in Belgium in August helped to increase the tensions of
the atmosphere.

Economic
distress quickly led to a demand for Parliamentary Reform. The
agitation for Reform was more widespread and dangerous than ever
before, though Reform meant quite different things to differ­ent
classes.

The
character of Parliament, the classes which dominated it, the methods
by which elections were carried out, its unrepresentative nature and
the ac­companying system of sinecures and jobbery in the first
decades of the 19th century differed in no funda­mental respect
from that prevailing a century before. A few sinecures had been
abolished and corruption was forced by the growth of criticism to be
a little more discreet, but these gains were more than out­weighed
by two changes for the worse.

The
growth of population since 1760, and the changed distribution of that
population, had made the members of Parliament even less
representative. Great new towns had sprung up which returned no
mem­bers: these included Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds and
Sheffield. Many of the old boroughs had remained small or had even
declined in population.

The
members did not represent the bulk of the inhabitants of the places
for which they sat. At the same time the industrial areas were almost
disfran­chised as compared with the rural areas and small but old
market towns dominated by local gentry. And, sec­ond, the class
of 40 shilling freeholders in whom the county franchise was vested
had been almost swept out of existence by the enclosures. The class
of yeo­men disappeared, the electors were mainly the land­owners.

The
Reform Bill had really two sides. One regu­larized the franchise,
giving the vote to tenant farm­ers in the counties (and thereby
increasing the influ­ence of the landowners in these
constituencies) and to the town middle class. In a number of boroughs
the right to vote was actually taken from a large number of people
who previously exercised it. About this side of the Bill the working
class was naturally unenthusiastic, but it was carefully kept in the
background while a furious campaign was worked up against the rotten
boroughs.

The
most popular part of the Bill was that which swept away the rotten
boroughs and transferred their members to the industrial towns and
the counties. Fif­ty-six boroughs lost both their members and
thirty more lost one. Forty-two new constituencies were cre­ated
in London and other large towns and sixty-five new members were given
to the counties.

Most
of the workers believed that once the old system of graft and
borough-mongering was swept away they could count on an immediate
improvement in their conditions. Hence the enthusiasm aroused by the
Reform Bill and hence their speedy and complete disillusionment
afterwards.

The
Bill passed into law on June 7th, 1832. It in­creased the
electorate only from 220,000 to 670,000 in a population of
14,000,000, but its other consequences can hardly be exaggerated.

First,
by placing political power in the hands of the industrial capitalists
and their middle class follow­ers it created a mass basis for the
Liberal Party which dominated politics throughout the middle of the
19th century. From this time some of the towns of the industrial
North began to send Radical members to Par­liament, and a
definite political group began to form to the left of the liberals,
sometimes cooperating with them, but frequently taking an independent
political line. There was always a group of members which sup­ported
the demands of the Chartists in the House of Commons.

In
the fifty-five years between 1830 and 1885 there were nine Whig and
Liberal governments that held office for a total of roughly forty-one
years: in the same period six Tory governments had only fourteen
years of office.

Second,
the Reform Bill altered the political bal­ance between the House
of Commons, the House of Lords and the Crown. The Commons gained at
the expense of the Lords because they were now able to claim to be
the representatives of the people against a clique of aristocrats.
The abolition of the rotten bor­oughs also robbed the peers of
much of their power to control the composition of the Lower House.
For the same reason the Crown lost the last of its means of direct
interference in Parliamentary politics. From this time the influence
of the Crown, though often consid­erable, had to be exercised
secretly, through its pri­vate contacts with politicians.

The
third consequence of passing of the Reform Bill was unintended and
indirect. The workers who had done most of the fighting soon realized
that they had been excluded from all the benefits, and the Poor Law
Act of 1834 convinced them that the Government was indifferent to
their needs. It is not accidental that the years immediately after
1832 were marked by a disgust­ed turning away of the masses from
parliamentary politics to revolutionary Trade Unionism, or that they
proceeded to build up in the Chartist Movement the first independent
political party of the working class.

4. The Poor Law of 1834

By
the 19th century, Britain had become an in­dustrial nation. The
population of the country increased, as well as the number of poor
people. For a generation the hand weavers and petty craftsmen had
fought desperately to escape the factories. Year by year their
incomes had fallen till a man could not hope to earn more than five
or six shillings for a full working week. Even with the help of the
existing Poor Law grants that was not enough to make ends meet. The
weavers, as well as the unemployed and casually unemployed farm
labourers starved.

According
to the Poor Law remaining in force, people who could not help being
poor could be given money or go to a workhouse run by a parish. In
the early 19th century most of the parishes were too poor to take
care of the ever-increasing amount of the poor. The British society
faced a serious social problem. Some­thing was to be done, and in
1834 the old Poor Law was amended.

The
Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 stated that no one fit to work was to
receive money at home. Par­ishes were grouped into "unions",
and each union had to have a workhouse, and pay for it out of the
rates. The principle of the new Poor Law was simple: every person in
need of relief must receive it inside a work­house. Workhouses
had been places mainly for the re­ception of the aged, the
disabled, of children and of all those too helpless and too
defenceless to avoid being put there. In 1834 they became the only
alternative to starvation for the poor.

The
condition of a pauper in a workhouse was to be "less eligible"
than that of the least prosperous workers outside. In the sinister
language of the Poor Law Commission of 1834, the able-bodied inmate
must be "subjected to such courses of labour and discipline as
will repel the indolent and vicious". At a time when millions of
people were on the verge of starvation, this object could only be
achieved by making the work­house the home of meanness and
cruelty. Families were divided, food was poor and scanty and the
tasks im­posed were hard and boring, oakum picking and stone
breaking being among the most common.

The
administration of the Act was deliberately removed as far as possible
from popular control by the appointment of three Commissioners who
became the most detested men in England. People dreaded the workhouse
and tried to protest. In some places work­houses were stormed and
burnt after fierce clashes between people and troops. In many of the
northern towns it was ten years or more before a workhouse was built.
The mass agitation, however, died about 1840 and the Poor Law was put
in force both in the rural and industrial areas.

5. The Corn Laws

The
object of the Corn Laws of 1815 was to keep the price of wheat at the
famine level it had reached during the Napoleonic Wars, when supplies
from Po­land and France were prevented from reaching En­gland.
All wheat imports were forbidden when the price fell below 50 s. the
quarter.

From
the beginning the Corn Laws were hated by everyone except the
landowners and farmers, and even the latter found that in practice
the fluctuation in wheat prices was ruinously violent and that the
market was often manipulated so as to rob them of the profit they
might have expected to make.

Attempts
in 1828 and 1842 to improve the Corn Laws by introducing a sliding
scale were not success­ful. Opposition to the Corn Laws, coupled
with demands for Parliamentary Reform, were widespread, but died down
after 1820 to be revived again by the coming of industrial depression
of 1837. This time it was an agitation not so much of the mass of the
people as of the industrial bourgeoisie anxious to reduce la­bour
costs.

In
1838 the Anti-Corn Law League was formed. League leaders such as
Richard Cobden and John Bright expected the repeal of tariffs on
imported food to advance the welfare of manufacturers and workers
alike, while promoting international trade and peace among nations.
The League's agitation produced a con­siderable effect on the
workers. Unprecedented in scale and lavishly financed this agitation
had all the advan­tages that the railways and cheap newspapers
could give. Whenever Cobden or Bright spoke their words were widely
reported in dozens of papers and the League orators were able to move
swiftly and easily all over the country.

In
the light of this continued pressure, combined with the plain fact
that the growth of population was making it impossible for England to
feed herself, the hesitating steps were taken towards Free Trade
after 1841.

The
first of these steps was dictated by the con­fused finance. Many
tariffs and duties were swept away and replaced by an income tax
which was both sim­pler and more productive, and in the long run
less burdensome upon industry. The effect of these tariffs
disappearance was to leave the Corn Laws as an iso­lated anomaly,
increasingly conspicuous and increa­singly difficult to defend.

Sir
Robert Peel, who was Prime Minister then, ma­de a thorough study
of the situation and realized that the belief common among landowners
that vast stores of wheat were lying in the Baltic granaries ready to
be poured into England was a pure fantasy. He knew that the surplus
of corn for export in any country was still small and that the most
the repeal of the Corn Laws would do would be to prevent an otherwise
inevitable rise in prices which might have had revolutionary
con­sequences. He managed to force through the repeal against the
will of the majority of his own supporters in June 1846.

6. The Railway Age

The
18th century was a boom time for building roads. At
the beginning
of
the century
it
took over three
days to
make
the journey from London to Ex­eter or Manchester. By the end of
the century the same journey took about 24 hours by coach. That
became
possible thanks to the network of new roads built by privately owned
Turnpike Trusts. Until the begin­ning of the 19th century,
however, British roads were still poor. They were badly rutted and
became practi­cally impassable in wet weather. Around the turn of
the century engineers Tho­mas Telford and John McAd-am devised
methods of building uniform, smooth, and durable roadbeds on which
heavy goods could be carried in carts and wagons without destroying
the roads. But still barges remained best for transporting heavy
goods, and towards the end of the 18th century engineers constructed
a system of canals that linked the larger rivers.

Water
transport was rather slow, greater speeds were demanded. The idea of
railway emerged as a result of the development of steam locomotives,
but building locomotives and rail systems was so expen­sive that
railroads were not widely used in Britain until the 1830's.

The
first practical locomotive was constructed in England in 1804 by
Richard Trevithick. It had smooth wheels operating on smooth metal
rails. At first the railway was looked on mainly as a means of
carrying goods, but it was soon discovered that the steam en­gine
was capable of far higher speeds than had been imagined and that it
could carry passengers more quick­ly and more cheaply than the
stage coach.

After
the successful trials of the Trevithick loco­motive, a number of
moderately successful locomo­tives were built in England,
primarily for use in mining.
In 1823 the Stockton-Darlington Railway was opened. In 1829 the much
more important line con­necting Manchester and Liverpool came
into existence. It was not until 1829 that a locomotive was
devel­oped for use in a railway carrying both passengers and
cargo. In that year The Rocket, a locomotive de­signed by the
British engineer George Stephenson, won a competition sponsored by
the Liverpool and Manches­ter Railroad.

The
Rocket pulled a load of three times its own weight at a speed of 20
km/hr and hauled a coach filled with passengers at 39 km/hr. This
performance stimu­lated the building of other locomotives and the
exten­sion of railroad lines. Investors saw railroads as a
prof­it-making venture and poured vast amounts of capital into
building rail systems throughout the nation.

A
regular fever of railway building, accompanied by a speculation boom
and much gambling in stocks and land values, set in. In the years
1834-1836 about £10,000,000 was raised for railway
construction. First in the industrial areas, then on the main routes
radiat­ing from London and then on the minor branches, thou­sands
of miles of track were laid down.

Much
of the capital expended on these works brought in no immediate
profit, and in 1845 there was a severe crisis extending to many
branches of industry and affecting a number of the banks. This crisis
soon passed, being rather the result of speculative optimism than of
any real instability of the railway companies, and was followed by
the new outburst of building.

The
railway building marked the beginning of a tremendous increase in all
branches of heavy indus­try, especially in such key industries as
coal mining and iron. The output of pig iron was 678,000 tons in
1830; in 1852 it was 2,701,000 tons. Coal output rose from 10,000,000
tons in 1800 to 100,000,000 tons in 1865.

Britain
was the first country to create a railway system. It also started to
build railways in countries all over the world, which proved to be a
very profitable business. Railroads played an especially important
role in the colonial and semi-colonial countries that had not a
sufficiently dense population or money enough to build for
themselves. Such railroads were usually not only built by British
contractors but financed by loans raised in London.

The
immediate internal effect of the railway boom was to create a large
demand for labour, both directly for railway construction and
indirectly in the coal min­ing, iron and steel and other
industries. In the second place, the railways made it much easier for
workers to get from place to place, to leave the villages and find a
factory town where work was to be had.

In
1801, 20 per cent of Britain's people lived in towns. By the end of
the 19th century, it was 75 per cent. London especially was like a
great octopus with its tentacles reaching out into the surrounding
coun­try. Life in the slums of big cities was grim. Although the
population as a whole was going up, more children died in the cities
than anywhere else. But rail travel made it easier for the better-off
to get to work. So suburbs grew up on the edge of towns, with better
and bigger houses, trees and gardens.

7. Factory Legislation

In
the earliest stages of the Industrial Revolution, when machinery was
crude, soon obsolete and worked by the uncertain and irregular power
of water, facto­ry owners were determined to get the fullest
possible use out of this machinery in the shortest possible time.
Hours of work rose to sixteen and even eighteen a day. In this way
the greatest output could be obtained with the least outlay of
capital.

When
the facts about factory conditions became generally known they
shocked the most part of the early nineteenth century Englishmen, and
agitation for the prohibition of some of the worst abuses was
started.

As
early as 1800-1815, in the years during which he managed the New
Lanark mills, Robert Owen had shown that output was not in direct
proportion to the number of hours worked, and that it was possible to
work a 10 1/2 hour day, to do without the labour of very young
children, and yet to make substantial profits. With the development
of faster, more accurate, more powerful, and more costly machines and
with the sub­stitution of steam power for water power, the
advan­tages from a very long working day became less. It was
always the water power mills where hours and conditions were the
worst and whose owners put up the most stubborn opposition to any
kind of change.

More
capital was sunk in machinery, and the rela­tion between the
capital so used and the capital used for the payment of wages
gradually changed. The amount of actual manual labour needed to
produce a given article decreased, and at the same time the speed at
which the new machinery would work became in­creasingly greater
than the speed at which men could work for a day lasting for sixteen
or eighteen hours. It became less economical to work the machine at
part speed over a long day than at full speed over a shorter one.

The
first legislation, passed in 1802, was a very mild act to prevent
some of the worst abuses connect­ed with the employment of pauper
children. It was followed by the Cotton Factories Regulation Act of
1819 which forbade the employment of children under nine
in cotton factories and limited the hours of those between nine and
sixteen to 13 1/2. As no machinery was ever provided for the
enforcement of this Act it remained a dead letter.

It
was not till 1833, after the passing of the Re­form Bill and
under pressure of the workers that an effective Act was passed. This
prohibited the employ­ment of children under nine except in silk
factories, limited the hours of older children and provided a number
of inspectors to see that these restrictions were carried out.

Factory
Legislation was a necessary part of that deve­lopment which
included the displacement of water po­wer by steam, the
wholescale use of machinery to manu­facture not only consumption
articles but the means of production themselves and the transfer of
the decisive point in production from the small to the large unit.